Enable Facebook Chat In Empathy

Empathy can support any protocol that pidgin does – this includes facebook chat.

Whilst there is no user-end plugin framework for Empathy as of yet, there is a simple hack around to get Facebook chat working in it.

Requirements

You’ll need to have Pidgin installed along with the pidgin-facebookchat plugin, too. (See here for that.)

You’ll also need to be running a version of Empathy that is 2.28 or later. If you’re using Karmic, you should be all set!

Enable Facebook Chat In Empathy

First we need to remove the haze.manager file. be caeful with the command below and make sure you type it identical to how it is below.

sudo rm /usr/share/telepathy/managers/haze.manager

Now we need to get some facebook icons for Empathy to use.

http://pidgin-facebookchat.googlecode.com/files/facebook_icons.zip

Once you’ve got them, extract the folder and navigate to the following folder with root privileges.

gksudo nautilus /usr/share/empathy/icons/hicolour/

Now simply drop the correct sized icons (not the folders they are in!) into the corresponding directories before you.

Terminal time: –

killall empathy

pkill mission-control-5

Restart Empathy and you will now see Facebook amongst the ‘add account’ options!

The Current Draw Back

Annoyingly in the most recent version of telepathy-haze there is a bug when adding a facebook account that results in a crash. It’s still worth enabling this for when the bug is squashed in a later update to telepathy.